Toon: Circle Joke

If you spend a lot of time watching cable TV news, first of all, do yourself a favor and stop; and second of all, you will have heard a variety of pundits, academics, and people of the mistaken belief that they should run for president someday, who are weighing in on Why Kamala Harris Lost The Election.

One of the leading theories is that President Joe Biden and those closest to him handicapped her by running for reelection in spite of mounting evidence that his mental acuity had begun to decline. Many of us, myself included, had voted for him in 2020 on the presumption that at 77, he planned to serve one term to repair the damage left behind by The Corrupt Trump administration, then hand leadership of the party over to someone younger.

Instead, he decided to run for reelection, as he put it, "to finish the job."

Which is ridiculous.

The presidency is not a job you're supposed to "finish." Each president does what he or (someday) she can, and turns it over to the next person. The job is never finished until the Republic is.

Donald Berzelius Trump, I fear, may "finish the job."

Anyway, my worry back when Biden announced his 2024 candidacy was that he didn't have confidence that Vice President Kamala Harris was up to taking over the job from him. Or that a Democratic Party primary battle would leave its victor hobbled by constituencies feeling that they were denied their due, or ignored, or unwelcome. Or, in the absence of a primary battle, ditto.

As things have turned out, plenty of Democratic constituencies are complaining about being denied their due, ignored, or unwelcome anyway. The Left complains that Harris tacked to the center instead of wholeheartedly campaigning on their agenda. The Centrists complain that Harris embraced "wokism" and transgender rights and people who say "Latinx."

I saw a scholar on The Daily Show this week promoting his election post-mortem book, arguing to Jon Stewart that Democrats were doomed by their embrace of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). He wasn't saying that Democrats should join Republicans in promoting Uniformity, Inequity, and Exclusion; just that they should call DEI something else — as if the right-wing propaganda machine wouldn't devote itself to turning the new name into a dirty word.

Now, I suppose that had Harris listened to the Palestinian rights crowd and condemned Netanyahu's genocidal war in Gaza, it might have been enough to get her over the finish line in Michigan. But it wouldn't have made the difference in any of the other "blue wall" swing states. Vowing to send undocumented alien drug dealers to Guantanamo might have gained her Arizona.

On the other hand, those moves might have helped about as much as affecting a southern drawl helped her in Georgia and North Carolina.

Q Toon: Anything You Can Do

The Arizona state legislature is working to send their governor a series of bills to put an NC-17 rating on any performance involving cross-dressing.

Introduced by Republican Senator Anthony Kern, SB 1030 specifically calls for regulation and business licenses for drag shows and a limitation of their hours, not allowing shows between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. Monday-Saturday and prohibiting shows on Sundays from 1 a.m. to 12 p.m. A violation would be a misdemeanor. That would impact Sunday morning drag brunches. “There are very popular drag brunches all over the Valley,” said [drag performer Richard] Stevens. “Some of them get anywhere from 100-300 people who just want to come out. They want to laugh.”

While Anthony Kern did not respond to Arizona’s Family for comment on his bill, Republican Senator John Kavanagh introduced one of the other bills [SB 1026] focused on not using state money to fund drag shows targeting kids. We asked him why he believes bills about drag shows are important right now. “I would suspect that this session suddenly there’s an interest in regulating drag shows because culturally there’s been a sudden preponderance or abundance of drag shows that are directed at children,” said Kavanagh.

And Senate Bill 1028, which would not allow anyone to "engage in an adult cabaret performance in either of the following locations: on pubic property or in a location where an adult cabaret performance could be viewed by a minor," would effectively criminalize "Drag Time Story Hour." 

Whether there have ever been any "Drag Time Story Hours" in Arizona, Idaho, or in any other state where Republicans are putting forth these bills, is beside the point. These new blue laws do not concern lewd or lascivious behavior. Their issue is choice of clothing. 

I toyed with several permutations of the idea behind this week's cartoon before picking up a pen. Should the drag performer channel Ethel Merman or Betty Hutton? Should there be a teacher or librarian somewhere? At one point, I was thinking of having a story read not by a female impersonator, but by some cis-het dude all dressed up in Mortal Combat Drag and a MAGA cap.

And how would be the best way to make pitching guns to schoolchildren sound ridiculous? I mean, isn't the idea preposterous on its face?

Apparently not. Friend of the blog John Kovalic came across this actual, I'm-not-making-this-up children's book, which, I have looked up myself and can vouch that its author is not kidding, trying to be ironic, or hoping to trick kids into learning arithmetic:

I refuse to link to any of the websites that sell this ammosexual groomer's primer of mass destruction, but it's a real book; and children are, if you'll pardon the expression, its target audience.

But really — how is a cartoonist supposed to outdo the lunatic fanaticism of such as Brian Lenney, M.A.?

Q Toon: At the Independents' Table

Democrats did not even get 24 hours to savor their 51-vote majority in the U.S. Senate before Senator Kyrsten Sinema decided to upstage Rev. Raphael Warnock and announce that she was bolting the party.

She joins Socialist Bernie Sanders (a Democrat in Presidential Politics Only) of Vermont and true Independent Angus King of Maine as the kids at the table in the corner. Both of them came to the Senate without pretending to be Democrats, and their voters elected them with full knowledge of where they stand on the key issues.

Sinema, on the other hand, an erstwhile Green Party activist from Arizona, has been a difficult member of the Democratic caucus, especially in the last two years. She stubbornly defended the chamber's filibuster rules that allow Republicans to block much of President Biden's agenda. Liberal activists have been suspicious that she has allowed herself to become beholden to big-money right-wing donors. 

Given how radically the Republican Party has lurched to the extreme right, I don't expect Sinema to stray far from Democratic Party stands on personal liberties. Fiscal and border issues seem likely to be another story. If the Republican House starts impeaching Biden administration officials willy-nilly, who the hell knows what Sinema would do?

She's up for reelection in 2024, and had been facing a strong challenger in the Democratic primary. By declaring herself an Independent, she sets up a three-way general election; and since Arizona does not have Georgia-style run-offs, even a Requblican who would make Kari Lake look reasonable could take the seat with a measly 34% of the vote.

Hold onto your tater tots.

Praising Arizona

The results are in, and Trumpster Kari Lake has been defeated in the race for Governor of the state of Arizona.

It's too bad that Saturday Night Live is on hiatus for the next couple of weeks.

I had been looking forward to a sketch in which Lake was played by Cecily Strong when filmed with a gauzy filter and by Amy Sedaris without it.

Or possibly by Andy Serkis.

Q Toon: A Hallowe'en Classic

This week's cartoon goes out especially to my readers in Philadelphia Gay News, where the Republican candidate for governor thinks a local hospital is abducting homeless children to practice gender reassignment surgery on them. (I'm not making this up. He is.) 

It was the latest in a series of extreme and false statements by Doug Mastriano, who made the comments during an interview with a right-wing network that features Steve Bannon and a steady stream QAnon conspiracies. ...

During a program this week the host of a program on the “Real America’s Voice” network asked Mastriano a loaded question about his Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race, Josh Shapiro, who is Pennsylvania’s Attorney General. Mastriano then took the opportunity to falsely claim: “He’s standing aside while the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is grabbing homeless kids and kids in foster care, apparently, and experimenting on them with gender transitioning, something that’s irreversible.”

Mr. Mastriano is not alone in fabricating false facts, of course. The Republicans' senatorial candidate in Georgia, football star Herschel Walker has become a laughingstock around the country for claiming that he's an FBI agent-cum-police special consultant who graduated valedictorian from the University of Georgia (no, he didn’t graduate at all) and started a breaded-chicken empire nobody else has ever heard of. Not to mention his denying the stray children and abortions he happens to be responsible for. 

Even his own campaign staffers admit that Walker is a serial liar.

And yet he stands an even or better chance of being Georgia's next senator.

The GQP candidate for governor in Arizona, Kari Lake, clings ferociously to the lie that some nefarious conspiracy stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Retrumplicans in her state tried over and over and over again to find evidence of massive voter fraud, only to come up with a greater Biden win in Arizona than in the original vote count.

If she is elected governor, she promises to add new restrictions on Arizonans' right to vote: only on Election Day, at a polling place, on paper (counted only by hand), and with voter identification on all ballots. That's right: no more secret ballot. And if she still doesn't like how the people vote, she'll simply refuse to certify the results.

And she has a five-point lead in the polls.

Here in Wisconsin, voters have already elected Ron Johnson to two craptastic terms in the U.S. Senate and may very well give him a third, in spite of his pretending that the January 6 insurrectionists were unarmed and peaceful, that mouthwash was as good or better at protecting against COVID-19 as the actual vaccines, and that Dr. Fauci had "overhyped" both COVID-19 and HIV-AIDS.

On January 6, 2021, Johnson sent lists of fraudulent electors to Vice President Mike Pence on the Senate floor in an effort to overturn the wills of Wisconsin — and Michigan — voters. Happily, Pence's staffer told Johnson's errand boy to get lost. Johnson's excuse once the episode came to light was that somebody, he doesn't know who, wanted something, he didn't know what, delivered to Pence that day, so he said, sure, whatever, what does it matter?

The list of these Republicans goes on and so forth, et cetera ad infinitum, with one after another running to be governor, secretary of state, attorney general, senator, congressperson, judge, district attorney, sheriff, school board member, and deputy assistant ombudsman of the water department from coast to coast — many of them firmly convinced that public schools are providing litter boxes for students who believe they are cats.

It's times like these when you wish the phrase "most important election in our lifetime" hadn't been used to describe every election in our lifetime.

Q Toon: Stiff as a Board

 

This week's cartoon could be about Walt Disney Corporation standing up (a bit tardily) to Florida state Republicans for passing "Don't Say Gay" into law, but having just drawn a cartoon about that law last week, I took a more generic approach this week.

Republican-dominated legislatures in one state after another after another have been attacking the LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender minors, with full fury this year.

The Alabama House of Representatives voted 66-28 for legislation to make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a doctor to prescribe puberty blockers or hormones or perform surgery to aid in the gender transition of people under age 19. The bill now goes to Republican Gov. Kay Ivey for her signature as Alabama becomes the latest red state to promote legislation and policies aimed at trans youth.

and

The Arizona Legislature passed bills Thursday to prohibit gender reassignment surgery for minors and ban transgender athletes from playing on girls sports teams, joining a growing list of Republican-controlled states attempting to restrict transgender rights as they gain more visibility in culture and society.

and

Texas Republicans’ growing focus on what they call “child gender modification” is the latest illustration of the state’s swing to the right after the 2020 election. And it reached an apex as both Abbott and Paxton were in the final days of primaries where they were getting pressured from their right over the issue.

and I haven't even gotten to the copycat "Don't Say Gay" legislation.

As I noted last week, Walt Disney Co. is only one of some 200 corporations protesting Florida's new law; major corporations across the country have done likewise in these other states.

But it has hardly deterred Republicans in any of them.

The GQP has such a lock on voters in gated communities, rural Mayberries, and the Foxosphere, that it hardly needs campaign cash from its American oligarchs any more. At least not on the national level. Thus it has turned its focus to local offices, especially school boards, brainwashing gullible Karens and Kevins that educators are teaching kindergartners post-graduate-level courses on sexuality, race, and Marxist dialectic.

(Well, they're right about the Marxist dialectic stuff. Only the schools call it "learning to share.") 

Perhaps it's time for responsible corporations, rather than pulling their advertising from right-wing media, to buy air time on Hannity and Tuckyo Rose. What these corporations say on Facebook and Twitter doesn't get past the algorithms and filters to get to the people who get all their opinions from Fox & Fiends.

Oh, who am I kidding?

What these corporations say on Facebook and Twitter about valuing LGBTQ+ employees and customers isn't half as important to them as larding up all levels of government with politicians who will gladly gut consumer safety laws, and ignore employee working conditions.

And most importantly, slash the corporation's tax burden. Those consumers and employees can pick up the cost.

Two By Two by Two

It's time to stop being so stingy with these dusty old cartoons every Saturday! This week, I've got a whole bunch of my own February cartoons from years ending in "2" for your nostalgic pleasure. Let's start with this valentine from February, 1982:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 11, 1982

I had forgotten about this cartoon until seeing it in the Ranger's on-line archives a few weeks ago. I guess I don't have the original any more; I may have drawn it expressly to fill a hole on page one, the original cartoon instead of a copy getting glued into position on the master sheet.

I'm pretty sure I never gave it away to anyone in hopes that they would be my valentine.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 25, 1982

As you can tell from the Valentine cartoon, I did a lot of cross-hatch shading in those days. A different technique that I dabbled with was rubbing a charcoal pencil over portions of the cartoon with a textured book cover behind it. I abandoned that approach when I switched over from drawing on plain old typing paper to sturdier bristol board.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., Feb. 5, 1992

Goose stepping ahead to 1992, I drew the above homage to Sir David Low's classic cartoon, in which Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin meet over Poland. Low's cartoon comes to mind any time two vehement opponents find common cause. In this case, the stand-in for Hitler was a bona fide Nazi David Duke, then a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, who had put himself forward as a presidential candidate in the Republican primaries despite having run as a Democrat just four years earlier. 

Wisconsin law at the time put on the ballot any candidate recognized by national news media, while allowing the bipartisan Election Commission the final say. The Commission denied Duke a spot on the ballot, albeit along party lines. Ordinarily, Duke would have condemned the American Civil Liberties Union as a bunch of criminal-coddling commies, but he welcomed their help in getting on the ballot in Wisconsin and other states.

The courts ruled in favor of Duke and the ACLU, but no matter. Pat Buchanan, with a longer record of Republican Party activity, won the lion's share of the white racist vote.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Feb. 13, 1992

With the Olympics just getting underway and the Soviet Reunion set to invade Ukraine any day now, I couldn't resist revisiting this cartoon about the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. This was the last time that the winter games would be held in the same year as the summer games, and these were the first Olympics held after the break-up of the USSR slightly over one month earlier.

Athletes who had trained to represent the USSR now found themselves without a country — or at least, in many cases, without a country that had an Olympic Committee. Athletes from Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan participated as representatives of "Unified Team" (Объединённая команда, or, officially, "Équipe unifiée"). The team won 54 gold medals among them, the winners standing on the podium as the Olympic flag was raised to the tune of the Olympic Hymn.

in The Biz, Milwaukee, 2002

2002 finds me drawing cartoons for The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee and its effort to spin off a flashy youth-oriented monthly supplement called The Biz. The Biz cartoons are my first works in full color. The version of Photoshop that I had at the time didn't have CMYK capability, but I did get to see The Biz in print, and I don't think the RGB files printed badly.

As with almost every other of my cartoons for The Business Journal, I was sent an article in need of an illustration. I have no recollection of what this article was about. Teamwork, I suppose.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2002

I wasn't even using computer-generated grayscale shading yet. There's quite a lot of cross-hatching in the above cartoon, much more than you're likely to find in anything I draw these days.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2012

Ten years later, I hadn't started sending colorized cartoons to Q Syndicate, but I saw that Dallas Voice was colorizing them on their own. This cartoon, about the outing of a closeted Arizona sheriff who had starred in John McCain's "Build The Dang Fence" commercial, was syndicated only in grayscale and bitmap versions. Figuring, however, that I needed to start offering a color option to syndicate subscribers, I upgraded my Photoshop and started playing around with it. 

The difference between RGB and CMYK formats is difficult to show on-line; but essentially, RGB format uses the red, green, and blue pixels on your screen to create 256 colors, whereas CMYK format is designed to use Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK ink on paper. An RGB image doesn't contain any true black per se, so CMYK is a better format for printing cartoons that do.

February, 2012

I had already colorized several cartoons for the on-line publications The Racine Post and the Racine iteration of Patch.com, AOL's foray in the late '00's to sponsor local news content. Likewise with the occasional cartoon that was published only on this blog, such as the above cartoon about right-wing advocacy for an amorphous religious exemption to Obamacare.

The cartoon started as a doodle while I spent an afternoon in a hospital waiting room. After I got home, I went ahead and committed it to ink and thence to computer screen and the interwebs.

A few months after this, I began sending colorized cartoons to Q Syndicate. It would be three years before I ever got to see how my CMYK formatted files actually turned out in print, when I attended the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention in Columbus. I still also send a grayscale cartoon to the syndicate, although to my knowledge, Philadelphia Gay News is the only newspaper that prints them that way.

Q Toon: Sinema Defends the Filibuster

So Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held a vote Wednesday on whether to end debate on the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and thus bring the bills themselves to a vote. This, even though the vote was doomed to fail, given that all fifty Republican Senators were guaranteed to vote to extend debate, and Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had announced that they would vote with the Republicans.

(Do we really need those Republican senators to show up for votes in the first place? They're going to vote No, everybody knows they're going to vote No, it's safe to predict that they will always vote No. Just score fifty No votes for every piece of legislation for the rest of the year and have done with it. Heck, since 60 votes are required to get legislation to a vote in the first place, all 100 Senators can go home and spend the rest of the year fellating their donors.)

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. LGBTQ+ voters were elated to see Kyrsten Sinema, an out bisexual, narrowly elected to the Senate from Arizona in 2018. She had the support of EMILY's List and progressives around the country, so a whole lot of people have been disappointed in her insistence in today's 50-50 Senate that Filibusters Are Good For Democracy.

Sen. Sinema, who has seven years experience serving in the minority party in Arizona legislature before coming to the U.S. Senate, gave her reasons why she learned to stop worrying and love the filibuster last week, citing how Democrats' efforts to get around Republican tactics have come around to bite them in the keyster:

"The 2013 decision by Senate Democrats to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for most judicial and presidential nominations led directly to a response in 2017 by Senate Republicans, who eliminated the threshold for Supreme Court nominees.

"These short-sighted actions by both parties have led to our current American Judiciary and Supreme Court, which, as I stand here today, is considering questions regarding fundamental rights Americans have enjoyed for decades."

She's not entirely wrong. If Democratic senators make an exception to the filibuster for voter rights, voting restriction bills are not the only agenda items Republicans would act on if they attain the majority. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) ticked off a list for Washington Times:

"More pro-life bills, more bills promoting, let's see, universal carry under the Second Amendment, say, more border security ... those are just a few of the areas."

So what are the Democrats to do in this Catch-2022 situation? Eliminate the filibuster now, and regret it as soon as there's a 51st Republican in the Senate? Or sit by and watch Republicans in statehouses around the country systematically disenfranchise Democratic voters?

 

That includes the Arizona statehouse, where the legislature and governor been working overtime to make sure Sinema becomes a one-term-and-done senator in 2024.

✍

 

P.S.: Somebody at DailyKos apparently liked this cartoon so much they posted it straight from the Q Syndicate feed on Tuesday, before any of its subscribers (or this, your humble scribe) had printed or posted it. I suppose I'm flattered; I don't think I've ever appeared on that particular site before — certainly not as a post's featured graphic.

 

Q Toon: Sinema Viditée

 

Democrats rejoiced in 2018 when Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema narrowly won the Senate seat vacated by Republican Jeff Flake to become the first openly bisexual senator in the United States. 

Now Sinema is one of two nominally Democratic senators double-handedly blocking President Biden's Build Back Better Bill. The other 48 Democratic senators, the Biden administration, and everyone in the press are struggling to figure out exactly what it would take to get her and West Virginia's Joe Manchin on board. 

In Manchin's case, we've pretty much figured out that he wants a bill that some theoretical Republican might vote for; which is akin to finding a steakhouse a vegan might agree to eat at, or a classical opera your four-year-old would like to sit through.

If there is something that Kyrsten Sinema would like to see stricken from or added to the bill, she is being extremely coy about making everyone else guess what it might be. A reporter in the Capitol attempted to get her to explain her position:

Q: What do you say to progressives who are frustrated they don’t know where you are?

SINEMA: “I’m in the Senate.”

Q: There are progressives in the Senate that are also frustrated they don’t know where you are either.

SINEMA: “I’m clearly right in front of the elevator.”

It's dickishness like that that gets you harassed in the rest room by frustrated former supporters.

 

Q: No, I mean, what is your position on negotiations?

SINEMA: Sitting down, usually.

Q: What is your position now?

SINEMA: I'm standing, silly. 

Q: Is there anything you would like to see in the bill?

SINEMA: Words and numbers. Charts.

Q: Can't you be serious for a moment?

SINEMA: No, I'm Kyrsten Sinema.

Q: Hold on — I'm just getting word that Susan Collins has announced that she might be persuaded to vote for the bill. I'm gonna go talk to her.

SINEMA: Wait, what? No! She can't — she can't do that!

Q: Of course she didn't. Gotcha!

'Twas the Noughts Before Christmas

December, 1980

In honor of Monday's Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, Spaceback Saturday opens today with a cartoon I drew 40 years ago this month to mark Voyager 1 having passed beyond Saturn. The probe sent back our first pictures of the dark side of the planet on its way out of of our solar system.

And we did indeed come again; Voyager 2 made a more extensive visit the following August, and the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004

in Manitou Messenger, St. Olaf College, MN, Dec. 5, 1980

My Saturn cartoon was just something I drew in my sketchbook and never published. This was the only cartoon I drew for publication in December; it featured Utah's brand new Senator-elect Orrin Hatch, of whom I didn't have a wealth of photos to draw from. Republicans won a majority in the Senate that year, but not in the House, so Hatch's proposal for a less-than-minimum wage didn't get very far.

It didn't go very far away, either. Republicans have kept hauling the idea out of storage again and again ever since.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, WI, Dec. 6, 1990

Jumping ahead ten years, we find leaders of the U.S. and Iraq heading inexorably toward Gulf War I. 

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, WI, December 13, 1990

Back in September, I posted a poster I had drawn for the UWM Post for which I had left the colorization to someone else — with dubious results. Here's a cover drawing I made for their Winter Sports issue three months later, for which I took care of the colorization myself. 

Having only two colors to work with, black and blue, simplified matters a bit; but unlike today, I didn't have a graphics program and computer to work with. The specific shades of black and blue were accomplished with halftone sheets, very thin plastic with a dot pattern on one side and adhesive on the other. Placing the larger pieces onto the drawing without any folds or wrinkles was one of the more challenging aspects of this drawing.

An advantage of this process over the easier Duoshade is that the originals created with their chemical process discolor over time. I still have the original drawing with the black halftone sheets on it (but not the separate blue overlay), and it hasn't discolored at all. 

I suppose if its artist portfolio were more heavily trafficked, the halftone plastic could have torn or come loose — and who knows what might have happened if I had hung this on a wall and exposed it to light for 30 years.

Okay, let's jump ahead another decade.

Q Syndicate, December, 2000

Setting aside some of the more dominant issues of December, 2000, we have this: the management of the Gospel Rescue Mission in Tucson issued an apology to their Republican Congressman for turning away his help at their homeless shelter over the Thanksgiving holiday.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - Rep. Jim Kolbe was asked not to volunteer at a Tucson homeless shelter's Thanksgiving dinner because he's a homosexual.

"This decision is based on your publicly announced sexual orientation that is diametrically opposite to admonitions in the Bible,'' Gospel Rescue Mission board member Evelyn H. Haugh wrote in a faxed memo. ``This mission is founded on biblical principles, and we cannot give a public forum to a public official who is blatantly flaunting those principles."

Kolbe, the only openly homosexual Republican congressman, downplayed the snub but said biblical teaching "tells us that no people should be made to feel smaller than others.''

"It would undermine the very essence of Thanksgiving if the good works of the Gospel Rescue Mission and others were eclipsed in controversy,'' Kolbe said. ``The mission has provided noble service to (the) community and I wish it only the best in its efforts to feed and clothe the downtrodden.''

Kolbe, a seven-term congressman who acknowledged his sexual orientation in 1996, helped serve meals at the shelter's Thanksgiving dinner last year.

Skip Woodward, board vice president, said Kolbe had been allowed to serve because "he just showed up and took us by surprise.''

"Kolbe's very public stand on homosexuality is inconsistent with our beliefs,'' Woodward said. ``We wouldn't want anyone who advocated adultery to serve either.''

Arizona Gov. Jane Hull expressed disappointment at the mission's revoked invitation to Kolbe, saying "hunger sees no sexual preference.''

in Milwaukee Business Journal, Dec. 14, 2000

The other day, NPR had a story about the death of the shopping mall. I don't remember the editorial I drew this cartoon to accompany, but apparently it had something to do with one shopping mall being pretty much like every other.

Which was pretty much the point, wasn't it? You could go shopping secure in the knowledge that there would be a Nordstroms, an Orange Julius, a WaldenBooks, a J. Crew, a Kay Jeweler, and a Sam Goody in whatever mall you went to, in whatever town you lived in. All in the comfort of the great indoors! What could possibly be more convenient?

Alas, the only constant is change. Adapt or die. Evolution is inevitable.

Q Syndicate, December, 2010

Which brings us to a cartoon from the waning days of 2010. Say, I hear this fellow has been back in the news again lately.

Q Toon: Mayor, Pietà

Presidential candidate and Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg interrupted his campaign to deal with a police shooting at home:

Eric Jack Logan, 54, was killed in South Bend after someone called police to report a suspicious person going through cars, according to the St. Joseph County Prosecutor's Office.
A police officer confronted a man in a vehicle at an apartment building parking lot. The man, later identified as Logan, got out of the vehicle and allegedly approached the officer with a knife raised, and the officer opened fire, the prosecutor's office said. Logan died at a hospital.

The officer, Sgt. Ryan O'Neil, was equipped with a body camera, but didn't turn it on, so we are left to trust his word over that of the deceased.

Because police Sgt. O'Neil is White and Mr. Logan was Black, the incident has inflamed racial tensions between the African-American community and the South Bend Police Department. Police-community relationships have been a sore point since very early in the Buttigieg administration. Three months after Buttigieg took office, a scandal broke over racist language police officers used in wiretapped phone calls, and Mayor Pete responded by firing three police officers and demoting South Bend Police Department Chief Darryl Boykins, who is Black.

In the years since, Black citizens have complained about abusive treatment by SBPD officers; a Latina mother was killed when an officer, without lights or siren on, was chasing a reckless driver and crashed into her car; and officers shot and killed another knife-wielding person of color in April of last year. Another SBPD Chief failed to come to the aid of an officer breaking up a fight at the city's Martin Luther King Center in 2013, even though the Chief was present at the Center.

In all these incidents, members of the community felt that the police individuals involved got off scot-free or with no more than a slap on the wrist. And when, after this latest incident, Buttigieg met with members of the Black community, the crowd let him know whom they held responsible.

Shirley Newbill, Eric’s mother, asked Buttigieg and the city to act on her son’s death.
“I have been here all my life, and you have not done a damn thing about me or my son or none of these people out here,” she said. “It’s time for you to do something.”
At one point, a woman at the rally told Buttigieg," You're running for president and you want black people to vote for you? That's not going to happen."

Following that rally, Buttigieg and the current Chief of Police, Scott Ruszkowski, tried to hold a formal Q&A with city residents. That didn't go smoothly, either.

Many made sure their voices were heard, often shouting over the mayor’s answers, calling him a liar or demanding that Ruszkowski be fired. When the crowd was asked to hold its anger, Komaneach Wheeler stood up and shouted “A mother of injustice cannot hold her anger!”
Some of the questions were pointed squarely at Buttigieg, whose run for president has put the Logan shooting and ensuing reaction in the national spotlight.
“How can we trust this process?” Blu Casey, a local activist, asked the mayor. “How are we supposed to trust you?”
Buttigieg at one point admitted that he had failed to bring greater diversity to the Police Department, where 5% of the officers are African-American, though he said it wasn’t for a lack of effort as he mentioned some initiatives the city undertook or is exploring.
“I promise you, we have tried everything we can think of,” he said.

For the small city mayor who thinks he's ready to be President of the United States, this will be the test that either substantiates or disproves that belief.

Because this is not just a South Bend, Indiana issue. Elsewhere this week, the mainstream media took note of exposure by the Plain View Project of racist and hateful remarks law enforcement officers in eight major cities have made on social media. We saw video of Phoenix, Arizona police pulling guns on a young Black family of four and screaming obscenities at them as if it were a case of the family shooting up a school instead of shoplifting a doll and a t-shirt from a Dollar Store. "Shooting Bias," the greater tendency of police to fire at Black civilians than at White ones, rates its own Wikipedia page.

Expect this topic to come up at tonight's Democratic Candidate Cattle Call.

Don't expect many African-Americans to be satisfied with what is said on the stage.

Q Toon: Sinema Vérité

I wanted to draw a cartoon this week about the Senate race in Arizona between Kyrsten Sinema and Martha McSally, which had yet to be decided when I sat down at my drawing board. Sinema was leading at the time, and has since been declared the winner, making her the first out bisexual elected to the Senate.

Reading a Huffington Post story about LGBTQ candidates elected to office convinced me to expand the scope of the cartoon to include Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), who coasted to reelection in my home state, and three newly elected members of the House of Representatives: Angie Craig (D-MN), Sharice Davids (D-KS), and Chris Pappas (D-NH). Cramming them all into one cartoon, I barely had enough room to squeeze in my signature.

And as soon as I thought I was finished inking the toon, I realized that I had completely forgotten about Congressman Mark Pocan (D-WI). It turns out that Pocan had no opponent in his Madison-area district, so he wasn't even in the local coverage of election results.

For that matter, I also neglected to include David Cicilline (D-RI), Sean Maloney (D-NY), and Mark Takano (D-HI).  Shame on me for not fact-checking HuffPo! My Spidey sense should have been tingling, if only because when I originally read their story, the lead photo at the top of the page was of Representative-elect Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who has not been identified as L, G, B, T, Q, or any of the other letters of the rainbow alphabet.

As for the Congresspersons who did make it into this week's cartoon, Sinema flips a Senate seat that has been Republican for three decades. She has been a member of the House's Blue Dog caucus of moderate and conservative Democrats, even winning the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2014. That didn't stop Republican opponent Martha McSally from trying to paint Sinema as a radical left winger, based on Sinema's having entered local politics as a candidate of the Green Party.

Baldwin is in fact well to the left of most Senators, but ran a finely tuned and savvy campaign for her third term. Unopposed in the primary while two Republicans duked it out for their party's nominations, she established herself in early television ads as having stood up for small towns hurt when their major employer pulls up stakes; for the cheese-making industry; and for favoring American-made products in military contracts. When ALEC stooge Leah Vukmir won the Republican nomination, Baldwin's ads attacked her relentlessly for acting to restrict access to and affordability of health insurance.

Craig, in a rematch of a race she lost in 2016, beat a militant libertarian who equated marriage equality with slavery and complained that calling a woman who has had more than one or two love interests in her life a "slut" just isn't acceptable any more. A former health care executive, she joined many others in her party in focusing her campaign on health care issues.

Davids makes history as the first out LGBTQ Representative from Kansas and one of the two first Native American women elected to Congress. A member of the Ho-Chunk nation, she unseated four-term Congressman David Yoder in the only swing district in a solidly red state. Another likely Blue Dog, she campaigned on working within the current health care system rather than promising Medicare for All, and she supported modest immigration reforms rather than abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Pappas was elected to succeed fellow Democrat Carol Shea Porter in what has been described as a bitter election from primary to general. The general election was as much a referendum on Donald Trump as anything else; in their first debate, Republican Eddie Edwards attacked Pappas over a photo taken at an LGBTQ pride parade of Pappas wearing a rainbow t-shirt with the word "Resist" across the chest. "I'm proud of who I am," Pappas replied, "and I'm proud to stand up against hate and bigotry and intolerance."

Q Toon: Avant la Deluge, Quoi?

As some of you may know, I draw my syndicated cartoons over the weekend to be released to LGBTQ newspapers and magazines, and the weekly ones hit the newsstands the following Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Has anyone else noticed how often these days last weekend's news seems like it happened ages ago?

Before Hurricane Harvey decided to park itself over Houston for most of this week, Donald Joffrey Trump issued a memorandum aimed at ridding the U.S. military of transgender service members. Before that, he held one of his campaign rallies in Phoenix, Arizona to tease his pardon of Joe Arpaio, the sadistic anti-Latino former sheriff of Maricopa County, convicted of contempt of court.

Stealing that particular show was a guy placed prominently in the audience standing behind Trump; he wore a white t-shirt proclaiming that Trump and the GOP are not racist and repeatedly holding up a hand-made "Blacks for Trump" sign. He certainly caught social media's attention, and people checking out the web site advertised on his t-shirt discovered that he also believes that Hillary Clinton was colluding with ISIS to wipe out all black and white women, and that Cherokee Indians are "the real KKK slave masters."

So while I'm usually hesitant to joke about the mentally ill, I still worry about a nation where seemingly insane ideas are cherished as gospel by astonishing numbers of Americans. The man at the podium and his loyal fans are particularly susceptible, believing that thousands of invisible Americans swelled the crowd at Trump's inauguration, Mexican rapists are hurling 60-lb. bundles of marijuana over our border fences, and transgender soldiers are bankrupting the Pentagon. We've got anti-vaxxers, birthers, Jade Helmsters, and people who actually buy the powdered bone drink mix hawked by Alex Jones.

There are people who firmly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that tax cuts will balance the budget. People still believe that shifting the cost of society from the people who make the money to the people who do the work is a recipe for properity. Wisconsin is betting that a $3 billion subsidy to lure Foxconn here will be worth the investment, even though the state is unlikely to break even for another 25-40 years — even if you believe Foxconn will still be around in 2058.

But people believe that stuff, because they desperately want to.

Heck, a full third of respondents to a Fox News poll released yesterday believe Trump is "drawing the county together."

So, yeah, I totally made up that transgender Latino soldiers for Trump guy for this cartoon.

Only because I've completely lost faith that such a person couldn't possibly exist.

Democratic Conventions Past

Last week, I dusted off a selection of my cartoons about Republican National Conventions. For Stepback Saturday this week, I ought to give the Democrats equal time.

There's just one problem about that. As Hillary Clinton demonstrated yesterday, Democratic nominees' vice-presidential picks are often spectacularly uninspired.

Walter Mondale's choice of New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro was surely intended to be bold and ground-breaking. The choice may have come off as such, if not for a perception that Mondale was yielding to feminist demands, or for his too-public "P.R. parade of personalities" (as Jesse Jackson called it) to his home in Minnesota before making his choice known. Besides, rival Jackson had beat Mondale to the punch by promising to name a woman to as his running mate if he had won the nomination.

1988 nominee Michael Dukakis played it too safe with the choice of Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen to balance the Massachusetts governor's ticket. Jesse Jackson had been the strongest of Dukakis's rivals for the nomination, and his supporters were disappointed that he didn't get the #2 spot.

And that's it.

Nobody got booed off the stage at the Democratic National Conventions of the 1990's, 2000's or (so far) the 2010's. As Veep picks, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards and Joe Biden didn't inspire me to rush to my drawing board to laud them as wonderful choices or to bemoan them as terrible ones. I have been inspired at other times to draw cartoons about each of them (which is more than I can say about Timothy M. Kaine), but not about their vice presidential nominations.

So screw equal time. Here's a cartoon about behavior by the front-row Texas delegation at George W. Bush's 2000 Republican National Convention, even though it was drawn three months later.

Q Toon: Danse Macabre

On the evening after the Orlando massacre at Pulse, Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California told his congregation:

"Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today? Um, no, I think that's great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight. ... There’s no tragedy,...I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out.” 

After a terrorist attack, you expect the nut jobs at the Westboro Baptist Church to crawl out of their cesspool to insult the victims. When the victims are LGB or T, the Westboro cult has its share of company among so-called Christians.

"The left is having a dilemma of major proportions and I think for those of us who disagree with some of their policies, the best thing to do is to sit on the sidelines and let them kill themselves.” -- Pat Robertson, 700 Club, Christian Broadcasting Network

"The good news is that there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world, because, you know, these homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles. That’s who was a victim here, are a bunch of, just, disgusting homosexuals at a gay bar, okay? Obviously, it’s not right for somebody to just, you know, shoot up the place, because that’s not going through the proper channels. But these people all should have been killed, anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels, as in they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed." -- Pastor Steven Anderson, Faithful Word Baptist Church, Arizona

“These 50 sodomites are all perverts and pedophiles, and they are the scum of the earth, and the earth is a little bit better place now. And I’ll take it a step further, because I heard on the news today, that there are still several dozen of these queers in ICU and intensive care. And I will pray to God like I did this morning, I will do it tonight, I’ll pray that God will finish the job that that man started, and he will end their life, and by tomorrow morning they will all be burning in hell, just like the rest of them, so that they don’t get any more opportunity to go out and hurt little children.” Pastor Donnie Romero, Stedfast Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas

Meanwhile, in Buford, Georgia, someone decided to spray paint over a hate message against gays and transgender persons that had been out front of The Back to the Bible Holiness Church for weeks before the massacre. Pastor Bobby Weeks bizarrely claimed that "I haven’t cursed anyone. I haven’t called anyone a name" with his sign which read "God created man and woman. Satan created gays and transgender." He further claimed that everyone is "welcome" in his church.

I suspect that the vandals possessed the same degree of restraint, love, and charity as Mr. Weeks.

This Week's Sneak Peek

The cartooning world lost one of its finest practitioners Sunday with the sudden passing of Mike Ritter, 48, in Atlanta. He was hospitalized for emergency open heart surgery over the weekend.

Editorial cartoonist for the Scottsdale Tribune and East Valley Tribune of Arizona from 1992 to 2005 and later for the Georgia Voice, he was president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in 2003-04 and a charter member of the Arizona chapter of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. His meticulously composed and witty cartoons garnered him first place honors in the Best of the West journalism contest in 2001 and 2003. At the time of his death, he was the Georgia Voice's Art Director. (See one example of his Arizona era work here, and several later cartoons at this Georgia Voice obituary)

I regret that I never got a chance to get to know Ritter; I joined the AAEC after he allowed his membership to lapse and have not been active in the NLGJ. I have long admired his work, though; and everyone seems to have stories about what a swell guy he was.

This week's sneak peek has nothing to do with any of that.

Q Toon: But It's a Dry Hate

I somehow forgot to post a sneak peek of my cartoon this week -- not that anyone was waiting with bated breath to play Guess The Cartoon, but I apologize to any fine drinking establishment that advertises Guess The Cartoon Night on Mondays. Here's the detail snippet from this week's cartoon anyway.

And here's the cartoon:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is expected to decide today whether or not to sign a bill that expands a religious exemption to any other law to include people who aren't actually religious practitioners. This is just so that wedding cake bakers and wedding photographers won't have to bake cakes or take pictures of LGBT couples. It begs the question of why any LGBT couple would want to hire a self-righteous bigot to bake their cake or take their picture, but there's always someone who finds religion after cashing the security deposit.

Q Toon: A Totally Gay Election

2012 will go down in history as the first year that voters approved marriage equality.

Different-sex marriage remains the law in Minnesota; but voters in Washington and Maryland approved prior action of their legislatures in favor of marriage equality, and voters in Maine overturned a previous referendum restricting marriage to straight couples. (And voters in Iowa rebuffed an effort to unseat a fourth justice of their Supreme Court who had ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2009.)

The six congressional candidates alluded to in this cartoon are incumbents Jared Polis (D-CO), David Cicilline (D-RI), and newly elected candidates Mark Pocan (D-WI), Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Mark Takano (D-WA), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The lone gay candidate to lose last Tuesday was Republican Richard Tisei, who narrowly lost to incumbent John Tierney (D-MA).

I went somewhat out on a limb by including Sinema in that list when I drew the cartoon on Sunday night. That race wasn't called in her favor until Tuesday. She will be the first openly bisexual member of Congress, and possibly its second out atheist.

And I'm particularly proud that my home state elected Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate. I'll admit that I occasionally had some doubts that Wisconsin would elect as Senator one of the most liberal members of the House (and I was not alone here) after making such a sharp turn to the right in 2010 and 2011. But, the unrelieved nastiness from all advertising comers in the fall notwithstanding, she did a great job of introducing herself to the voters while Tommy Thompson and his Republican rivals were busy attacking each other in the spring and summer.

÷ ÷ ÷

Regarding Saturday's blog entry about in the Strand Magazine, I've been trying to find the next article in Arthur Lord's series on American editorial cartoonists in 1902, so far without success. In fact, I have been unable to find Mr. Lord's article in Google's on-line digitization of the October, 1902 edition of Strand Magazine in which it is supposed to have appeared.

What Mr. Gus Frederick says on his Homer Davenport site is: "Through Ebay, I recently obtained a selection of nine original pages from the October, 1902 number of The Strand Magazine from London. This was an article entitled The American Cartoonist and His Work by Arthur Lord and featured short bios and examples of four 'famous' cartoonists of the day."

Mr. Frederick posted an Optical Character Recognition rendition of the text and illustrations rather than images of those nine pages, so we can't confirm that they have "The Strand Magazine" in the top margin of alternate pages, as the magazine would have had. I have so far found no reference to anyone in the U.S. or Canada having started up a "Strand Magazine" stateside, or that there was a separate North American edition of the London publication. (Perhaps in London, Ontario?)

One reason I suspect that the publication is American is the lack of any British condescension toward the New World cartoonists or the U.S. press. When Ohio Senator Mark Hanna is first mentioned in the article, it is by his last name alone, indicating that the author expected all of his readers to know who "Hanna" was. It's a reasonable assumption that American readers would recognize "Hanna" as the Karl Rove of William McKinley's presidency, but would British readers?

Mr. Frederick notes the British spellings -- "draughtsman," rather than "draftsman"; "abhour" instead of "abhor" -- and florid language of the article, but that doesn't guarantee that the pages were published in London. "American" spelling was not universally accepted in in this country in 1902. American spelling dates back at least as far as Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary, but there were resistance and ridicule when Teddy Roosevelt proposed making "simplified spelling" official in 1906.

My first thought was that the pages might be from another publication. I thought of Public Opinion, which was fond of printing editorial cartoons; but it was published weekly, not monthly, and doesn't appear to have attached bylines to its feature articles. It seems unlikely that Puck would have profiled a cartoonist from the competing Harper's Weekly while ignoring its own remarkable cartoonists. Harper's Weekly, of course, was published weekly; and, like any other magazine of its day, put its own name on the top of every page.

I'll keep looking.

Qtoon: 14, 12, or 11 Years Later

Q SyndicateΔOct 11, 2012

Today is National Coming Out Day, and to mark the occasion, I decided to follow up on a cartoon I drew way back in 1998. (See this week's "Sneak Peek.")

In the original cartoon, Uncle Jim did most of the talking to his 18-year-old nephew, Dylan. The cartoon implied that Uncle Jim was past his 38th birthday but still well short of his 48th. Twelve years later, Dylan would be 30, and Jim somewhere in his 50's. Uncle Jim has changed his appearance significantly over the years. He's put on a fair amount of weight and decided to compensate for his thinning hair by growing a heavy beard. Nephew Dylan now wears glasses and has exchanged his shaggy mane for something with more product in it.

Now, most of my readers don't have my life's work at their fingertips, so it's not like any of the following really matters. But if there are any obsessive fans reading this blog, there is one nagging little inconsistency about this week's cartoon that I might as well try to explain.

I added the copyright date in the second panel as I was nearly done inking the cartoon, and suddenly realized that 1998 was fourteen years ago, not twelve. I hadn't left myself enough room to change "twelve" to "fourteen," so we're left to suppose that perhaps Dylan didn't come out to his parents at 18 (after all, in the original cartoon, Jim advises him that there's no rush to do so) but two years later after another conversation at this diner.

Then, when I hunted up the digital file for Monday's Sneak Peek, I found that for reasons I cannot recall, its copyright date had been changed to 2001. This cartoon was originally drawn in August, 1998 as a "reserve" -- to be released at some later date when I might not have another cartoon at the ready, so my first thought was that we held onto that reserve cartoon for three years.

There is a note on the page the cartoon was drawn on, however, indicating that it appeared in the Phoenix Echo in October, 1998. (Back then, a few of the papers in which my cartoons appeared would mail me those issues.) So either I mistakenly included this cartoon for three years in the January ritual of updating the copyright dates of the unreleased reserves, or somebody wanted to re-release this cartoon in 2001.

I don't have any idea. All I know is that I've fallen woefully behind in keeping up a supply of reserves; I've been without one for months, if not years. I've learned that there's little point in drawing up reserves such as the original Dylan and Jim cartoon for release at specific dates on the calendar unless I have plans to be busy or on vacation at that time. It's more useful to have something totally generic in case of emergency, and I have less need for a reserve Christmas cartoon than I have for a cartoon to be released for publication immediately after Christmas.

By the way, if you have any confident predictions about what is going to be a happenin' topic for LGBT readers around December 27 of this year, I'm all ears.